LESSONS FROM MADRID

Professor compares urban planning in San Diego and abroad

Mike Stepner, one-time city planner and architect and currently a professor at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design, spent much of May in Madrid, teaching and learning at an affiliated school, the University of Europe-Madrid.

“They have the urban stuff down pretty well,” he said, “but not the stuff in the outlying areas.”

With notebook and camera in hand, Stepner and his wife, Rosie, walked the streets and roamed the countryside in Spain looking for examples of what to do, and not do, in San Diego.

Here are some of his take-away thoughts on what San Diego can learn from its one-time colonial master and what Spain can learn from us.

Q: It seems ironic that an American planner would talk to Europe about planning when we often admire how they handle city development.

A: It some ways they want us to talk to about how we’re correcting some of our mistakes so they can learn from them.

Q: You found American-style suburban communities outside Madrid. It seems like they were going backward.

A: I think it’s the same argument new urbanists make in the U.S. We built a lot of things before World War II that were walkable and had good public transit. Then after World War II, things changed and in some ways the same thing is happening, only it’s more than 25 years later. People see what Americans have and want something similar.

Q: Why do residents in central Madrid want to move to the ’burbs?

A: One of the reasons is schools. Some people feel suburban schools are better. Another is they want to have more space. The third reason is people are complaining in many cases that it’s getting very expensive to live in Madrid. The demand for some of this urban development is raising the rents. You move out farther and pay less money. It’s the same syndrome as here. What you end up with is a situation where people put money they save on rent into the car because they’re driving everywhere.

Q: Americans often marvel at the many shops within short walking distance of Europeans’ in-town homes. What’s the secret?

A: One of the things I found is that because there’s no parking and because of the intensity of development, you could walk to a grocery store — we had two groceries a block and half away from where we lived.

Q: What are three things you took away from Madrid that San Diego should seriously think of adopting as planning or zoning rules that would make life better and not cost billions of dollars?

A: I think making sure that we have services — parks, libraries, schools — to accompany the higher density. I think design matters — and you really need to pay attention to the quality of design wherever you go, public or private. Third is scale: In older parts of Madrid, the buildings were of a scale that really protected and maintained the character of Madrid — six- or seven-story buildings that weren’t whole blocks.

Q: What are three things San Diego could offer to Madrid in return?

A: They should avoid building roads to our standards; follow the way they built roads earlier. Secondly, community engagement: A lot of it is top-down planning and there’s a reaction. The third thing I think we can teach them... is preservation of large swathes of open space, as we’re doing with MSCP (the multiple species conservation program).

Q: We often think Europeans are doing a better job than we are in creating buffers between development.

A: In some places they do. But as I’d ride a bus from downtown Madrid to the campus, it looked like here. There’d be the beginning of small areas (of development) surrounded by cows and you’d see off in the distance that there was isolated and even abandoned stuff that was started and didn’t quite make it. It wasn’t very well designed or laid out. I think looking at what you preserve and what you don’t, maybe they could begin to handle that.

Q: What’s one more observation of your time in Spain?

A: We could teach them how to control graffiti. We paint it out right away — we have the Urban Corps and other people. Except in some major tourist areas and ones that are always busy, in a lot of neighborhoods it’s just as high as someone could reach. People seem to be inured to that. And yet in some of the new areas like new parks, they have not been touched. People like them and they are protected.